Colloquium: Asuman Turkmen

Speaker: Asuman Turkmen, The Ohio State University

Title: The Hunt for Missing Heritability: Discovering Rare Variant Effects in Association Studies

Abstract: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have led to discovery of numerous common genetic variants linked to complex traits such as heart disease, diabetes, and auto-immune diseases.  Despite these successes, the genetic variants identified so far can only account for a small proportion of the presumed phenotypic variation. The inability to find the complete genetic causes for complex traits has been called the "missing heritability" problem.  With the ability to sequence genomic regions deeply, researchers have been looking beyond common sequence differences and interrogating rare variants that might solve the mystery of missing heritability. In this talk, I will introduce  Kullback-Leibler distance based Tests (KLTs) to reveal possible genetic effects related to rare as well as common variants in case-control studies. The proposed tests are based on the idea of measuring the differences between distributions using Kullback-Leibler distance so that one can capture significant features of cases and controls. Extensive simulation studies and an application to the Dallas Heart Study data are utilized to compare our newly proposed tests with other promising methods in the literature. The numerical results show that the proposed tests are attractive alternatives for association studies involving rare variants.

This talk is based on a joint work with Zhifei Yan, Yueqing Hu and Shili Lin.

Faculty host: Nedret Billor